Elder Neal A. Maxwell has indicated some of the characteristics of the term "past feeling":
President Harold B. Lee has called our attention to the phrase "past feeling" which is used several places in the scriptures. In Ephesians, Paul links it to lasciviousness that apparently so sated its victims that they sought "uncleanness with greediness." Moroni used the same two words to describe a decaying society which was "without civilization," "without order and without mercy," and in which people had "lost their love, one towards another." Insensate, this society saw violence, gross immorality, brutality and all kinds of "kamikaze" behavior. Nephi used the same concept in his earlier lamentation about his brothers' inability to heed the urgings of the Spirit because they were "past feeling." The common thread is obvious: the inevitable dulling of our capacity to feel renders us impervious to conscience, to the needs of others, and to insights both intellectual and spiritual. Such imperceptivity, like alcoholism, apparently reaches a stage where the will can no longer enforce itself upon our impulses. (For the Power Is in Them [Deseret Book Co., 1970], p. 22.)